Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 5

Before he composes the song, Ezhuthachan stops and asks for permission. He asks his guru. He asks the gods. He asks the bhū-suras, the brahmins of his time, the earth-gods. Aruḷka, please grant. The whole sixty-eight-verse work has not yet begun, and verse 5 is the bow that opens the door.

If you have ever sat down to do something and felt the work was already not yours, the verse is for you. Ezhuthachan does not say I will compose. He says let the composing be granted. The work is being received, not seized.

If you have come to this verse with the suspicion that you are too small to take on a long practice, that you will not have the will to keep it up till death, the verse hands you the right prayer. Not grant me the will. Only this: let the speaking of it not be lost. From the day of birth to the moment death falls, let the Name not stop being said. The verse asks for the practice to outlast the practitioner.

The Living Words

Harināmakīrttanam itu raceyvatu. The composing of this Hari-name-song. Kīrtanam is the Sanskrit kīrtana, praising aloud. Raceyvatu is to compose, but with a softer connotation: to arrange, to weave together. Ezhuthachan does not say to write. He says to weave, as a tailor weaves a cloth.

Guruvaruḷāle. By the aruḷ, the grace, of the guru. Aruḷ is the Tamil-Malayalam word for divine grace, the same word the Tamil Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava traditions use for what the Sanskrit calls anugraha. The guru's grace is not optional infrastructure for the work; it is the substrate the work is woven on.

Dēvakaḷumaruḷcey­ka bhūsuraruṁ. May the gods also grant, and the bhū-suras (the earth-gods, the Brahmins). The verse names three lineages of authorization: guru, gods, brahmins. Read carefully, the gesture is more open than it sounds. Ezhuthachan himself, the tradition records, was denied the sacred thread by the orthodox Brahmins of his birthplace. He could have refused them in turn. Instead he asks for their blessing too. The verse is open-handed: it asks the lineage that did not welcome him, and the lineage that did, and the lineage above both, all in one breath. Whoever you are reading this, the aruḷka of verse 5 is asking the lineage you carry to bless the work the verse is about to begin.

Naranāy janiccu bhuvi maraṇaṁ bhavippaḷavum. Born as a human on the earth, until death falls. The Malayalam bhavippaḷavum carries the sense of for the duration of, for as long as. The Sanskrit canon names the last moment of this duration anta-kāla, the time at the end, the last moment of life; the Bhagavad Gītā promises that the one who remembers the Lord at anta-kāla reaches the Lord's own being. The commitment of verse 5 is for the entire human life up to that moment.

Uraceyvatinn aruḷka. Grant the speaking of it. Ura is speech, aruḷka is please grant. The verb is the imperative of grace, not of demand. The verse is asking the Lord to let the speaking happen, not asking the Lord to make it happen.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

Why does Ezhuthachan, four verses into a sixty-eight-verse work, stop to ask permission?

Because the kīrtana of Hari's name is not, in the tradition he is standing inside, a private invention. It is a stream that has been flowing through the centuries, and the seeker is asking to step into the stream.

The Bhāgavata Purāṇa, in the very last book before its closing summary, gives the canonical authorization. Kaler doṣa-nidhe rājann asti hy eko mahān guṇaḥ; kīrtanād eva kṛṣṇasya mukta-saṅgaḥ paraṁ vrajet. O King, although Kali Yuga is an ocean of faults, it has one supreme virtue: by kīrtana of Kṛṣṇa alone, one becomes free of attachments and reaches the supreme. Śukadeva is speaking to Parīkṣit; the conversation is the central frame of the entire Bhāgavata. The line gives the kīrtana practice its full Vedic charter. Verse 5 of the Harināma Kīrtanam is the Malayalam form of this charter. Ezhuthachan is not inventing a practice. He is asking permission to step into a stream that has been carrying seekers home for centuries.

If you have come to this verse with the suspicion that you have to invent your way home alone, the verse is gentler than the suspicion. The way home has already been walked. The Name has been the road for everyone who has gone before. The seeker is being invited to step in, and aruḷka is the form of the invitation. Aruḷ in the Tamil-Malayalam stream is not generic please; it is responsive grace, the grace that meets the seeker's prapatti, the seeker's act of placing themselves before the Lord with empty hands. The verse is doing the prapatti and asking for the aruḷ in the same breath.

The Bhagavad Gītā, in its eighth chapter, gave the practice its closing image. Anta-kāle ca mām eva smaran muktvā kalevaram, yaḥ prayāti sa mad-bhāvaṁ yāti nāsty atra saṁśayaḥ. One who, at the time of death, remembering me alone, leaves the body, attains my being. There is no doubt in this. Krishna does not say the seeker has to die in any particular ritual. He says only that the remembering at the last moment is what carries the seeker into Krishna's own being. Verse 5 is asking, in plain Malayalam, that this remembering not fail. Maraṇaṁ bhavippaḷavum uraceyvatinn aruḷka. When death falls, let the speaking of it not be lost.

The Bhāgavata, in its sixth book, says it as plainly as the verse: etāvān eva loke'smin puṁsāṁ dharmaḥ paraḥ smṛtaḥ, bhakti-yogo bhagavati tan-nāma-grahaṇādibhiḥ. This much alone, in this world, is declared the highest dharma for human beings: bhakti-yoga toward the Lord, beginning with the taking of his Name. Yamarāja, the lord of death, is teaching this to his own messengers. The Name is the practice that meets death without fear, because the Name has already been the practice that walked through every other moment.

If you have come to this verse with a long history of half-finished disciplines, with the painful awareness that you have started and stopped many practices in your life, the verse is for you. The verse does not ask you to commit, by your own willpower, to a discipline that lasts till death. The verse asks the Lord to let the speaking of it not be lost. The discipline is not the seeker's; the discipline is the Name's, holding on to the seeker through the years the seeker cannot account for.

The closing word of the Malayalam line is the same word the closing line of every Hari-name verse in this work returns to. Nārāyaṇāya namaḥ. Salutation to Nārāyaṇa. Verse 5 is the seal of intention; the rest of the work is the long execution. Each remaining verse is one more breath of the lifelong recitation the seeker who chooses can begin here.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Four saints carried this verse as their long practice.

Sant Nāmdev, thirteenth-century Maharashtra, was a tailor's son who came to kīrtana through Jñāneśvara and Visoba Khecar. He stood at the door of the Pandharpur temple with cymbals in his hand and sang Vitthala's name for hours; he composed abhangas in Marathi that the village memorized before a single one was written down. Late in life he walked north, settled at Ghuman in the Punjab for more than twenty years, and the Sikh Ādi Granth, when it was compiled, included sixty-one of his hymns (śabdas). The body image is the road and the cymbals: the saint who carried the Name across two languages and four hundred kilometres, on his own feet.

Haridāsa Ṭhākur, fifteenth-century Bengal, took the verse-5 commitment to its furthest reach. He was born to a Muslim family in the village of Buron in what is now Bangladesh, and was brought to Vaiṣṇavism by his own japa. Caitanya Mahāprabhu, when they met, gave him the title Nāmācārya, the teacher of the Name. The discipline the tradition keeps of him, by the tradition's reckoning, is three hundred thousand names of Kṛṣṇa every day, on a wooden seat, until his last breath. He never wrote a treatise. He did nothing else with his life. The discipline was his whole vocation, not an item on a list. Body image: the small thatched hut, the wooden seat smoothed by years of one body sitting on it, the steady murmur of Hare Kṛṣṇa through every hour the saint was awake.

Tyāgarāja, eighteenth-century Tamil Nadu, kept the verse-5 commitment in the form of song. A Telugu Brahmin in the small village of Tiruvaiyāru on the Kāveri, he composed thousands of kṛtis in Telugu and Sanskrit, every one of them on Rāma. The Maratha king of Tanjore sent his minister to invite Tyāgarāja to the court, with gold and a palanquin and a position. Tyāgarāja refused. He composed, in answer, the kṛti Nidhi cāla sukhamā: is wealth a comfort, or is the worship of Rāma a comfort? The kṛti is still sung in concert halls today, and every singer who learns it sings the saint's refusal back into the air.

Sūrdās, sixteenth-century Braj, sang the verse-5 commitment from blindness. The tradition records him as blind from birth; the Vallabha sampradāya in particular preserves him as the blind poet who sat at the temple of Śrīnāthjī and composed padas on Krishna's childhood. The Sūrsāgar preserves a thousand of them. Tradition records that he composed by speaking aloud and his disciples wrote down what he sang. The body image is the blind man with the iktārā at the temple courtyard, the disciples sitting around him with paper and ink, the Krishna-child who came each evening to the lap of the parent the singer had become.